QL update: new content and skillmatching checkup!

I don’t really repeat the QL newspage that often. Since you are a fan of Quake Live, you should read them all on the Quake Live website anyway, but sometimes it’s worthy to repeat and mention the key points that make this update more valuable to the players than others.

New content and improved skill matching!

Those are the two main topics of September 28th’s update.

Added maps
One Duel map and three Clan Arena maps are now part of the premium content.

Fatal Instinct, a castle themed, foggy map, originally being the Tier 5 “Veteran” end-boss map against Uriel in the Single Player campaign of Quake 3, is a small size, square map with not too many weapons (SG, RL, PG), health and armor (1 YA) and allows for really fast paced 1on1 – or small team size – combat.

Aside from this oldskool map, 3 small sized Duel/Clan Arena maps were added to the Premium pool, 2 of which emerge from Rocket Arena: Somewhat Damaged and Thunderstruck. Also released for Quake Live is Devilish, a very nicely gothic-looking Duel map which also lends itself for small size team games in CA or TDM. Devilish originally comes from Justin Ingels who came out 5th in the Noghost Mapping competition last year.

Somewhat Damaged

Thunderstruck

Devilish

A 2nd leaf of this update is the skill matching system. It has been updated with new algorithms and is supposed to offer a far better representation of your skill. These changes of course also affect the match making and enhancements have been applied to the servers as well to categorise them in a new 3 Tier system. Low holds 25%, Mid holds the bigger 50% chunk and High holds the top 25%. There is a sanctuary tier for the entry level players to prevent regular skilled players of scaring them away from Quake Live 😉

Exactly which updates and enhancements were made, are detailed in the developer blog post on the Quake Live forum.

Apart from these 2 main factors, more game/site/map changes and updates are detailed in the changelog.

More info:

• September 28th, 2010 update news bulletin
• Skill ranking and match making info
• Quake Live on IRC in #quakelive and #quakelive.support (Quakenet)

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